Sunday Sessions: For Those Displaced

I usu­ally wake up with a song in my head.

I am not a singer, but on some par­al­lel plane, I am using my lower reg­is­ter for good and not evil. I imag­ine myself as a soul singer, the kind with the gritty, dirty voice that recalls the term histri­on­ics over and over again. There would absolutely be no shame in my game.

Today’s melody was all of Corinne Bai­ley Rae’s “Girl Put Your Records On”. The fol­low­ing is the acoustic ver­sion, which feels so per­fectly impromptu. I love the the naked­ness of Corinne’s craft here, and that DJ look­ing on as smit­ten, and maybe even as blown away as I felt, well…:

Three lit­tle birds sat on my win­dow and they told me I don’t need to worry…

My pas­tor always says that all truth is not nec­es­sar­ily con­tained in Scrip­ture. And I am not quite sure I need to repeat that, but I will any­way. All truth is not nec­es­sar­ily con­tained in Scripture.

The moment I heard that bit of rev­e­la­tion, my world opened up. My spirit was in instant agree­ment. I under­stood that truth was hap­pen­ing around me all the time. In my own life’s story, my neigh­bors, yours…

Today, became Day 2 of mov­ing from our town home of the past two years, to an apart­ment for what we hope will be a year to pre­pare for home own­er­ship. My hus­band and I, although united on our ulti­mate pur­pose in the move, have been pon­der­ing our own ideas of home, and that build­ing, and what it means to have a phys­i­cal foundation.

I am of a mind that wher­ever we are, we can carve out that nec­es­sary space and be in a good place.

What Cor­rine and her three lit­tle birds, so rem­i­nis­cent of Bro Bob’s brought today was a mes­sage on the wind. So, I was not overly sur­prised that one thing pulled the next:

25 — There­fore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 — Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, nei­ther do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heav­enly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much bet­ter than they?

This is the KJV (King James Ver­sion) rendering—a per­sonal favorite being a poet and all.

I love the reminder of God’s invest­ment in my every wak­ing and dream­ing hour. This is not my sus­pen­sion of belief, but rather my anchor of faith. And of course I needed the reminders from Corinne and this par­tic­u­lar Scripture—which came with­out my calling—as we down­sized into what we some­times feel is a step backward.

I know now that all that is well and good. It is part of the unfold­ing story. The half hav­ing not been told and all that.

And, as if I needed this par­tic­u­lar truth to come in threes—which con­fir­ma­tion in my life so often does—I could hear Susan Best, a the Gospel artist from Anguilla singing a favorite:

Why should I worry about tomor­row, when every­day God takes care of me. If he can clothe and beau­tify lilies. How much more will he take care of me?

Every­thing is rel­a­tive. We hear it all the time. And it’s cer­tainly true here. The past 2 days of a planned move, has given me many per­sonal rea­sons to pause and con­sider. Yet, it has also struck a more poignant nerve, as today marks the 5th anniver­sary of the Kat­rina disaster.

As I con­sider the forced and inevitable dis­place­ment of those who lost every­thing, and their con­tin­ued strug­gles to live, even after hav­ing sur­vived the storm and after­math, I thought of Yous­sou N’dour and a song on his 2002 album Nothing’s In Vain called “Genné” (For Those Displaced).

Please for­give the stum­bling start and abrupt end­ing of this video, it is the only one I could find.

I’ve always loved this song, first musi­cally and then lyri­cally. It is so apt for not only a post-Katrina world, but a world where there is still an appalling ground sit­u­a­tion in Haiti—even 6 months later, and a Pak­istan reel­ing from its most recent flood­ing disaster.

It is not that now, sud­denly, after 700 + words of reflec­tion that I have a han­dle on mov­ing, the dreams of home-ownership, the ills of soci­ety or my own world­view. It is rather, that even as I steal time to write this, I am lifted out of the tun­nel vision of my own life and I rec­og­nize that we do what we must to sur­vive and be at peace.

I pray that those who are dis­placed can find the pil­low that may be the shoul­der of a friend, part­ner or lover to rest their weary eyes and mind. And for those that are alone (and not nec­es­sar­ily lonely) I pray that you can still close their eyes and dream.

For the lat­est stream­ing of New Orleans post-Katrina info head over to NOLA. And to help with the relief/recovery efforts in Pak­istan and/or Haiti, I absolutely love and trust the work of Amer­i­can Jew­ish World Ser­vice as they con­tinue to work with grass­roots agen­cies on the ground.

AJWS is ded­i­cated to alle­vi­at­ing poverty, hunger and dis­ease among the peo­ple of the devel­op­ing world regard­less of race, reli­gion or nationality.

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